Issue #241

July 5 2018

Editor Picks

Game titles produced by AIThe RNN started out knowing nothing about language, video games, or the world. It still knows nothing, but now it generates fake game titles. I read 5,000 of the titles it produced and selected my favorites to share. I felt like I was shopping from a mail order catalog. I think that's the best way to enjoy these titles. Imagine it's 1990. There are a bunch of new games on the market, but there's nowhere to read reviews. Would you spend money on one of these games, sight unseen?...

Capture the Flag: the emergence of complex cooperative agentsMastering the strategy, tactical understanding, and team play involved in multiplayer video games represents a critical challenge for AI research. Now, through new developments in reinforcement learning, our agents have achieved human-level performance in Quake III Arena Capture the Flag, a complex multi-agent environment and one of the canonical 3D first-person multiplayer games...

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Data Science Articles & Videos

No, Machine Learning is not just glorified StatisticsThe purpose of this post isn’t to argue against an AI winter, however. It is also not to argue that one academic group deserves the credit for deep learning over another; rather, it is to make the case that credit is due; that the developments seen go beyond big computers and nicer datasets; that machine learning, with the recent success in deep neural networks and related work, represents the world’s foremost frontier of technological progress...

Global Migration, animated with RThe animation below, by Shanghai University professor Guy Abel, shows migration within and between regions of the world from 1960 to 2015...

Relativistic GANAlthough filled with silly pictures, this work is no joke and I believe it is an important step forward for GANs. In this paper, I argue that standard GAN (SGAN) is missing a fundamental property, i.e., training the generator should not only increase the probability that fake data is real but also decrease the probability that real data is real. This property is fundamental and should have been in the very first GAN...

It’s easier than you think to craft AI tools without typing a line of codeA lot of companies are trying to make it easier to use artificial intelligence, but few are making it as simple as Lobe. The startup, which launched earlier this year, offers users a clean drag-and-drop interface for building deep learning algorithms from scratch. It’s mainly focused on machine vision. That means if you want to build a tool that recognizes different houseplants or can count the number of birds in a tree, you can do it all in Lobe without typing a single line of code...

Are we close to having machines solve TopCoder problems?With the emergence of deep learning, neural networks started performing almost at a human level in many tasks: visual object recognition, translation between languages, speech recognition, and many other. One area where they haven’t shown anything exciting yet is programming...

Marvel Cinematic Universe Superhero Ranking:
An Emoji VisualisationAs I watch MCU movies and especially the Avengers movies, one question constantly nags me — who is the most powerful MCU superhero? An analysis based on personality AND powers doesn’t mean much when when the superhero is going up against Thanos. Powers trump everything so the best superhero should also be the most powerful superhero. But the bigger question is — do the number of powers matter or does the type of power matter more? Let’s look at the data....

Jobs

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Training & Resources

Apply Transforms To PyTorch Torchvision DatasetsLearn how to use the Torchvision Transforms Parameter in the initialization function to apply transforms to PyTorch Torchvision Datasets during the data import process, via a screencast video and full tutorial transcript...

The Emotional Voices Database: Towards Controlling the Emotion Dimension in Voice Generation SystemsIn this paper, we present a database of emotional speech intended to be open-sourced and used for synthesis and generation purpose. It contains data for male and female actors in English and a male actor in French. The database covers 5 emotion classes so it could be suitable to build synthesis and voice transformation systems with the potential to control the emotional dimension in a continuous way...

Announcing an Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using PythonWe are excited to announce the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) Software Development Kit (SDK) for Python (beta). The SDK includes the same features available in our Java and Node.js SDKs, and allows you to reduce the amount of boilerplate code you have to write to process Alexa responses and requests. If you code using Python, you can use the SDK to quickly build and deliver voice experiences using Alexa and the extensive Python support libraries and tools...

Books

Much of the data available today is unstructured and text-heavy, making it challenging for analysts to apply their usual data wrangling and visualization tools. With this practical book, you’ll explore text-mining techniques with tidytext, a package that authors Julia Silge and David Robinson developed using the tidy principles behind R packages like ggraph and dplyr. You’ll learn how tidytext and other tidy tools in R can make text analysis easier and more effective....